Thank you for the question.
Again, it is well known to the members of this committee and others that the HACCP application to food safety was actually developed several decades ago in the United States by the Pillsbury Company, when they were contracted by NASA to develop food safety programs for astronauts, because obviously it would be catastrophic if an astronaut developed a food-borne illness in space in the absence of medical attention. The development of that programming, as was indicated, has been adapted. It is the gold standard, as referenced by the United Nations groups on food safety, Codex Alimentarius, and the World Health Organization. It is advocated globally as the best standard or the best way, because it allows you to map known risks, to map and document, as you've indicated, how you will manage that risk, and then to document—through verification—that you did what you said you would do. When things don't work out properly, it then provides the framework to go back and verify properly where the breakdown was. It's real-time analysis and a real-time response. It doesn't wait for someone to find the problem later on.
I'm a firm believer that in the absence of HACCP this issue would not have been identified. I suspect that some of the very important work done by Maple Leaf Foods in their internal assessment was to relook at their HACCP plan, to look at the unidentified risk and try to come to a.... It was actually the HACCP that said to them that if they were getting positives in the environment and then getting negatives after sanitation, but it kept persisting, there was then something in their HACCP plan saying there was something about the location they needed to rethink.
So I think HACCP helped them arrive at a conclusion much earlier than would otherwise have been the case.